In his youth, Jeff Bowman, ’08, ’14, found oceans fascinating. However, like many high schoolers, Jeff resisted studying and felt restless to enter the “real world.” This prompted him to join the Army.
“During my time in the Army, I had the opportunity to study combat leadership at the Army’s prestigious Ranger School. There was a lot of memorizing — intricate protocols that we’d need to be able to recall under extremely stressful situations. That’s what taught me how to organize information and study effectively.”
After spending four years in an elite airborne unit, including two tours to Afghanistan, Jeff felt ready to continue his education. He was still interested in oceans and wanted to better understand how they regulate the Earth’s systems.
But five years had passed since high school, and he questioned his ability to succeed in college. Affordability was also a concern, since he was relying on the Army College Fund and GI Bill to pay his tuition. He re-entered the academic world cautiously and started at Bellevue Community College. To his relief, he found the transition back to school relatively easy. Because he could focus on science, Jeff started to enjoy studying.
“Upon earning my associates of science degree, I chose to come to the University of Washington because they had a first-rate oceanography program. I knew I could get an affordable, yet top-notch education that would prepare me for graduate school.”
Becoming an independent researcher
Jeff entered the UW as a junior and joined Dr. Julian P. Sachs’ lab right away. At first, this work was largely entry-level — washing glassware and running samples. But he credits this experience with orienting him to lab work and introducing him to the possibility of independent research.
“I had always been interested in oceanography and the sciences, so a Ph.D. seemed like a natural goal. However, I didn’t know if I had what it takes. I didn’t know how well I’d do at research. The Levinson Emerging Scholars program gave me a chance to try my hand at independent research, as if I were a grad student. I got to come up with the ideas, the hypothesis, with limited guidance. This experience helped me prove to myself that I could excel at research.”
Jeff received the Levinson Emerging Scholar award his senior year. His project focused on studying halophilic, or salt-loving, bacteria to better understand Earth’s past climate. To do this, he analyzed sediment samples from hypersaline lakes to understand how the bacterial community has changed as the salinity of the lakes changed. His goal: To retroactively understand how halophilic bacteria have adapted to their environment over the past 10,000 years.
“At heart, I’m a microbiologist. My Levinson project was the combination of my love of microbiology with my belief that by better understanding organisms now, we can better understand the conditions that they experienced in the past. It also helps us understand how life might exist on in very salty or very cold environments on other worlds.”
“My mentor, Julian P. Sachs, was the ideal Levinson mentor. We met frequently, but he was hands-off when it came to doing the research. The experiment design was entirely up to me. Had he been more involved in the procedures, I may have gotten more results. But, this way, I learned how to do the research. And that has given me the skills to be where I am today. We still work together, and I anticipate that we will continue to collaborate in the future.”
“Through my Levinson scholarship, I learned that failure is an important part of the process. I learned to keep my morale up and think through the process. I learned to problem solve. If my experiment didn’t yield results, I learned how to regroup and try something else. Learning this early in my education has been a critical part of my career success.”
Researching in the Arctic and Antarctic
“My current research in high latitude environments is a direct outgrowth of my Levinson work. It cemented my interested in understanding how organisms live in and adapt to extreme environments. By combining molecular techniques, physiological assays, biogeochemical observations and modeling approaches, it is possible to understand microbes sufficiently to understand the impact that environmental change will have on the ecosystem functions they provide.”
Jeff’s fascination with extreme environments led him to earn a Ph.D. in oceanography and astrobiology from the UW and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. However, instead of focusing on saline environments, his graduate work focused on sea ice and other environments that are both saline and cold. These environments host highly specialized cold-loving organisms known as psychrophiles. Over the course of his career thus far, Jeff has done field research in Antarctica at Palmer and McMurdo Stations, across the Arctic including the North Pole and Barrow, Alaska, and aboard the Antarctic research vessel Laurence M. Gould.
Gallery: Going to the extreme
“Due to climate change, much of the arctic is no longer covered by sea ice year-round. This increases the amount of sunlight that reaches the water, which, in turn, impacts the cycling of carbon and other elements through the ecosystem. One of my main research themes is how bacteria in sea ice produces carbon and other elements. It is critical to understand processes like this in order to understand how the biosphere and the environment change together.”
See how sea ice gets sampled
Video by Rutgers University undergraduate Ashley Goncalves, who spent her junior year with the Palmer LTER project at Palmer Station.
Video by the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research team.
Building the future with the bricks from the past
After Jeff completes his post-doctoral fellowship in January, 2017, he will start his assistant professorship at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. There, he will continue to study the way microorganisms adapt to their environments. His self-described “audacious” next project is to join the year-long MOSAiC polar drift project, providing critical data on microbial processes in sea ice and seawater to climate scientists.
“The Levinson application was my first time thinking about how to fund the science that I wanted to do. Figuring out how to talk about my research in a few pages was really challenging. Now, it feels pretty natural. But that early exposure to grant writing prompted me to find opportunities to write grants. This is so challenging for young scientists but it has paid off. I’m happy to share I recently got my first National Science Foundation proposal funded!”